It started with the poker. On holiday in Donegal last autumn, I bought one of Jack Voss's beautiful handcrafted pokers, and brought it home and hung it on the wall. Where it caused much amusement among my visitors, because the apartment I'm renting does not have a fireplace. Two months ago, I found an old fire set of brush, tongs, shovel and poker in my favourite shop in Dublin - Ranelagh's Mrs Greene's Shop, in aid of Cheeverstown House - and brought them home and stood them under the Donegal poker.
Two weeks later, I started househunting in earnest for the first time in my life, and apart from the old truism about "location, location, location", top of my wish-list was an open fire.
The words "house" and "hunting", when taken together, usually incite signs of despair these days. Property supplements are something akin to the new pornography, so deeply offensive do some of the prices quoted seem to be.
You could - I certainly could - drive myself to utter despair by doing sums and working out how much more house I could have got for my money even two years ago, not to mention being able to buy in the location I really want to be in. But there is no point, so brow-beating on the topic is a useless, boring and depressing exercise.
In the first two weeks of looking, I had seen four apartments, seven cottages and five little houses. After a couple of days, I ditched the apartment route; the lure of my own front door called strongly. This was not before viewing what was billed as a "two-bedroomed apartment" in a Georgian house close to Leeson Street Bridge.
The house had been butchered into mincemeat-type pieces, and the whole place had a whiff of BSE about it. The "two-bedroomed apartment" was in the basement, and one small barred window was the only source of natural light in the place. The "bedrooms" had been created when the developer had put up partition walls in the room, thus dividing one large nasty room into three hideous hell-holes. Neither of the so-called bedrooms had any light or ventilation at all. Surely a breach of building regulations?
OH, how I laughed at the notion of buying such a dump! The agent was sufficiently embarrassed to squirm and apologise, as I wished him the joy of getting shot of it. I subsequently watched the price come down £10,000 each week, and wondered who would want to live in such a place for any price.
Apart from the open fire, next on my wish-list was room for a table in the kitchen, to entertain family and friends - not to mention seating myself in comfort while consuming my usual daily crust. Of the 16 properties I viewed, only three had room for tables in the kitchen, which I had always considered as necessary a domestic fixture as a loo in the bathroom.
One vendor showed me her tiny tableless kitchen, announcing proudly that the hob, which had been put in eight years previously, was "brand new". How come? "I've only used it once," she said brightly.
So where did she eat? What did she do when people came to dinner? She ate out, and it seems nobody came to dinner, or if they did, they brought it with them.
I soon found out what the current asking price per square foot in Dublin is: £414. The value of a property is determined by measuring the square footage and multiplying by that price. I measured my own apartment, which I'd consider small enough, and felt slightly faint when realised it was 490 square feet. As none of the cottages I was looking at was more than 420 square feet - and some were a fair bit smaller than that - where would all my stuff fit?
It's probably impossible for people living outside Dublin to understand how hard it is to find a decent affordable property. To be honest, it's often hard for me too, and I've been living in Dublin for almost four years now.
An open fire, a tiny yard, and my own front door are the current extent of my fantasies, but because these are now possible, modest though they are, they're every bit as seductive to me as the gracious Victorian house, lawn, trees, and scores of rosebushes that I inhabited in my childhood fantasies.
Two weeks into my search, I was viewing two properties on the trot, both handled by the same agent. There was a couple viewing them too, and we arrived on the second doorstep at the same time. Talk ensued about how long we had all been looking.
"It's true what my friends said," the man offered. "Houses are like cars. You can only test-drive so many before you get fed up and just go for whatever you see next." I don't happen to agree with that view, but I can understand the frustration that lies behind it.
HOUSES are like cars in some respects, however - the tiny size. I viewed one sweet-looking cottage which was about as bijou as it's possible to be without being in a toyshop. Opening the back door to the scrap of yard, I rose a few startled inches in the air as a large brown bunny with long floppy ears bolted past me.
The rabbit scampered round the place for a few minutes before hopping up on the futon in the bedroom and waffling its whiskers at me invitingly. It was a surreal Alice in Wonderland-type moment. It looked like the cottage belonged to the bunny, and the place was on about the same scale: virtually a rabbit hutch.
You don't need any cliches these days to sell property. I've only seen fresh flowers on one occasion (which coincidentally turned out to be the place for which I made a successful offer), and certainly inhaled no smells of baking bread or coffee. I have, however, felt quite ill after inhaling the smell from an oil tank located under a kitchen window, the smell of which permeated the entire house. If you feel nauseous after 15 minutes in a place, what can it be like to live there?
Most people do tidy up for viewings, but one house for sale that was being rented out resembled an animal's lair: a scramble of torn bedding on the floor, rotting food in the filthy kitchen, a putrid stench in the bathroom, and dirt smeared over the landing walls. OK, so you can clean a place up, but I'd feel very odd about living somewhere that had been so uncared for by previous owners; some of that bad atmosphere has got to have seeped into the walls over time.
And I admired the wooden waist-high wainscotting in one cottage I returned to for a second look, bringing an architect friend in tow. Admired it, that is, until he scrutinised it and pointed out that both wainscotting and fresh coat of paint were there solely to disguise the galloping rising damp in the place.
I was extraordinarily lucky. It took only three weeks to find a place I loved and could afford, and which does not require more than minor cosmetic work. The entire experience was pleasurable, interesting and exciting, although absolutely nobody believes me when I say this.
Meanwhile, my fire installation is growing. A friend has given me a briquette which I plan to burn ritually on the first fire I make when I move into my beautiful little cottage, and am finally able to use those pokers.
rboland@irish-times.ie